Learning The Details

May 1, 1988|By Pat Jordon

I have to go to the west coast of Florida soon -- to Sarasota. It is a trip I have been dreading these past few weeks, because it will bring back so many memories. I have not been there in 10 years. I was 36 years old the last time, a writer on assignment in Clearwater Beach, when my mother telephoned me from Connecticut to remind me to make sure I visited my uncle, her brother.

''He only lives down the street!'' she said, with her usual hyperbole. He lived on Longboat Key, a good hour-and-a-half drive from where I was. Still, that distance would never dissuade me from visiting my uncle, who had meant so much to me as a child. I made plans to surprise him.

Uncle Ben had retired from his draftsman's job in Connecticut only a few years before. He moved to Longboat Key with his wife, Ada, who could never have children. That was one of the great disappointments of my uncle's life. He had always loved children.

Uncle Ben spent his Florida days tending a lone orange tree in his back yard overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. He sent me a few oranges his first winters there. They were leathery, brown-skinned fruit I would have thrown out if not for the accompanying note in that perfect, slanting, draftsman's hand of his, all in capital letters.

He described those oranges in such glowing terms. How he'd nursed them through a frost and insects. How he'd waited until just before they were ripe to send them along so they would ripen in transit. How he'd picked them with his own hands, with a certain twisting motion of his wrist. He wrote that that motion was not unlike the curveball motion he had taught me when I was a star Little League pitcher and he was my coach.

Finally, as if anticipating my furrowed brow at the sight of their un- orangelike skin, he wrote that truly sweet Florida oranges have a leathery skin that protects the fruit inside.

Naturally, they were the sweetest oranges I had ever tasted. That probably had more to do with his embellishing letter than the fruit itself. Uncle Ben had a way of taking the most mundane thing -- a leathery-skinned orange -- and singing its praises so that it became a thing of wonder in the eyes of a child.

He always saw me as a child. No matter how old I became, no matter that I got married, and had children of my own, my uncle still saw me as I had been as a child. ''Paddy,'' he called me.

But I never did see my uncle again. I had to fly home suddenly from Clearwater, and by the time I got back to Florida again, years later, he had died.

I have tried to visualize him when he was sick, on his death bed. But he was such a vibrant man that no matter how hard I try I can never see him as he must have been. I can only see him as he had always been when I was a child, and had meant so much to me.

My uncle was our town's Little League coach when I was 12, and the star of the team. The job usually came up every two years. The father of one of the players would coach until his son graduated and then quit; then a new father would take over. Even though Uncle Ben had no sons, it was assumed by our townspeople that he would coach until I graduated. But they were wrong. He was still our town's coach 20 years later when I was married with children of my own.

As my Little League coach, my uncle was harder on me than he was on the other players, all of whom he treated not like children, but like small adults. We both knew his hardness was a ruse to hide his obvious affection for me, his nephew. He called me ''Jordan,'' not ''Paddy,'' and at practices he made me carry the heavy canvas bat bag from his car to the field.

When he pitched batting practice, he always made me hit last, even though I was leading the team in home runs, in addition to being its star pitcher.

He threw batting practice wearing his chino slacks and a crewneck shetland sweater. He threw stiffly, like a man who had come to baseball late in life. (There was no Little League in the Italian ghetto where he was raised. I'm sure he didn't really become aware of baseball until he became Americanized in his adult years.) Whenever I faced him in batting practice he always grunted a little harder when he threw his fastball, and he always tried to fool me with his curve by not telling me it was coming. (He always let the other players know.) It wasn't really much of a curve, just a little, lopsided spin with a last-second wrinkle. I made a point of bailing out of the batter's box on his curve every once in a while to make him feel good. He'd growl at me, ''Come on, Jordan, hang in there like a man!''